Education of the republic of uzbekistan state world languages university english language faculty

Keywordsfireside poetsschoolroom poets19th-century American poetryWilliam Cullen BryantHenry Wadsworth LongfellowJohn Greenleaf WhittierOliver Wendell HolmesJames Russell Lowell
SubjectsNorth American Literatures
Updated in this version
Summary and keywords added, Further Reading list updated, minor edits made to the text.
Then, warmly supplied with books,
While my wood-fire supplies the sun’s defect,
Whispering old forest-sagas in its dreams,
I take my May down from the happy shelf
Where perch the world’s rare song-birds in a row.
(James Russell Lowell, “Under the Willows”)
At the end of the 19th century, with the last of their number dead only a half-dozen years, the five poets known collectively as the Fireside Poets or Schoolroom Poets—William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—held a central place in the American literary tradition. Yet by the end of the 20th century their collective place had vanished. Their survival at all in the classrooms of the 21st century (the reading aloud of poetry by a fireside having vanished with their collective reputation) is now a matter of individual survival, with a small handful of poems by Longfellow and two or three each by Bryant and Whittier remaining in anthologies that have dropped Holmes and Lowell altogether. Perhaps it is for the best that each poet stand on his own merits alone, for they may well be more interesting for individual rather than shared characteristics. Yet before considering each individually, it is worth considering them together, as together they represent virtues that are endangered if not permanently extirpated from American literature.
Their differences are many. While three—Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell—were Harvard professors, Bryant never finished college and spent most of his adult life as a newspaper editor in New York City, and Whittier was largely self-educated. All at times were capable of sentimental writing, but only Longfellow really developed this vein, whereas Holmes was more often wry and playful and Lowell sometimes intellectual to a fault. Holmes acknowledged and embraced a patrician bias, while Whittier wrote poems of working people and lowly life and Longfellow made himself the exemplar of middle-class life. Of the five, only Longfellow and Bryant are best remembered for their poetry; Holmes and Lowell each had equal success in prose (and Holmes, a professor of medicine, had even more success in that field, saving countless lives through his identification of the cause of puerperal—childbed—fever), while Whittier is equally remembered for his tireless work to end the evil of slavery in America.
Yet their public was not wrong to think of them as forming a group to which Emerson or Whitman or Dickinson, to take three poets whose reputations came to overshadow theirs in the 20th century, did not belong. All derived their idea of poetry to varying degrees from 18th-century English verse, an idea of poetry less personal and more worldly than that of Emerson or Whitman or Dickinson. All were formally restrained, maintaining decorum even as, at their best, each sought an authentic American voice. And although Whittier was once stoned by a mob in New Hampshire for his abolitionist views and although Holmes, at the other extreme, held himself aloof from the hurly-burly of life, all five were men with whom the common reader of the day felt comfortable. They were not alienated from their society or from humanity as were, each in their own way, their contemporaries who have come to be more admired—not only Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson, but also Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville. Their poetry did not disturb the genial warmth of the fireside or the earnest striving for improvement of the schoolroom. Yet as American society in the 21st century is ever more engulfed by the noise and solipsism of a culture too much alienated from the heart of both humanity and nature, it might once more find refreshment in a less alienated, more ordered, and more balanced poetry.